not ensue, nor did commercial integrity
receive any stimulus from her participation in commercial pursuits. What
indubitably did ensue was a more sharp and bitter competition in the
industrial world through this increase of more than thirty per cent, in
its wage-earning population. In no age nor country has there ever been
sufficient employment for those requiring it. The effect of so enormously
increasing the already disproportionate number of workers in a single
generation could be no other than disastrous. Every woman employed
displaced or excluded some man, who, compelled to seek a lower employment,
displaced another, and so on, until the least capable or most unlucky of
the series became a tramp--a nomadic mendicant criminal! The number of
these dangerous vagrants in the beginning of the twentieth century of
their era has been estimated by Holobom at no less than seven and a half
_blukuks_! Of course, they were as tow to the fires of sedition, anarchy
and insurrection. It does not very nearly relate to our present purpose,
but it is impossible not to note in passing that this unhappy result,
directly flowing from woman's invasion of the industrial field, was
unaccompanied by any material advantage to herself. Individual women, here
and there one, may themselves have earned the support that they would
otherwise not have received, but the sex as a whole was not benefited.
They provided for themselves no better than they had previously been
provided for, and would still have been provided for, by the men whom they
displaced. The whole somber incident is unrelieved by a single gleam of
light.

Previously to this invasion of the industrial field by woman there had
arisen conditions that were in themselves peculiarly menacing to the
social fabric. Some of the philosophers of the period, rummaging amongst
the dubious and misunderstood facts of commercial and industrial history,
had discovered what they were pleased to term "the law of supply and
demand"; and this they expounded with so ingenious a sophistry, and so
copious a wealth of illustration and example that what is at best but a
faulty and imperfectly applicable principle, limited and cut into by all
manner of other considerations, came to be accepted as the sole
explanation and basis of material prosperity and an infallible rule for
the proper conduct of industrial affairs. In obedience to this "law"--for,
interpreting it in its straitest sense they understood it t